Keeping In Touch With Your Intuition: Kim Beam Of Social Work Your Life On How Get In Touch With Your Intuition And When To Trust Your Intuition When Making Decisions
An Interview With Maria Angelova
Meditate. The more you know how your brain thinks and experiences the world, the more you will be able to notice when you are being guided with deeper thoughts and ideas. If you know your mind and your thoughts, you will be able to discern what is yours and what comes from a higher bit of intelligence outside yourself.
Intuition is defined as the ability to understand something immediately without the need for conscious reasoning. Where does intuition come from? Can it be trusted? How can someone tune in to their intuition? To address these questions, we are talking to business leaders, coaches, mental health experts, authors, and anyone who is an authority on “How to Get In Touch With Your Intuition And When To Trust Your Intuition When Making Decisions.” As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kim Beam.
Kim Beam is an educator, a creative writer, a social worker, a cancer survivor, and so much more to come. Her life experiences and gut intuition have guided her throughout her career, first as a middle and high school English teacher, and later as an intuitive social worker. Her intuition and mindfulness combined with her education in social work birthed the concept behind her passion project: Social Work Your Life.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
My dad left my mom before I was one and a half. I have no recollection of him in my house growing up. Every other weekend, I went to my dad’s house. There were a number of years where I would transition from my dad’s back to my mom’s and I would spend Sunday night being sick in the bathroom at Mom’s. This was the 80s and anxiety was not a thing we talked about. In fact, the anxiety I was experiencing would not be diagnosed until my mid-20’s. I’m a reader, a writer, and a meditator. I have been pursuing my intuition for over 20 years and have learned a thing or two about hearing for myself and hearing for others.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I have a quote from Tina Fey on my refrigerator. It says, “Say yes, and you’ll figure it out later.” For so many years in my life, because of anxiety and feeling out of control, I said, “No.” I would say “no” to going to New York City for the day. I would say “no” to hanging out with people who were outside my circles, or to new adventures because they felt uncomfortable. Now, I’m in the habit of saying YES, even if I’m uncomfortable or don’t want to. I figure there’s an adventure to be had, an experience to learn from, a moment to embrace if I say “yes.” If I were to say “no,” I might seriously miss out. I feel strongly that if you do something and give it all you have and it doesn’t work out by the world’s definitions of success, you are still successful. You put yourself out there. You were brave and you attempted. In my book, that’s always a win.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
I went to a reikist and at the end of the session, I noticed she had the book The Law of Attraction by Esther and Jerry Hicks on the coffee table in her studio. She said it was a book that changed her life. I got it, and I read it. I then read Ask and It is Given by Esther and Jerry Hicks and I put some of their practices in place. They suggest giving yourself play money in a ledger. They say to give yourself $10,000 a day and then write checks to all the expenses you can dream of, even create a few. So I would go a couple of days and let the money build and I would pay off my house, or buy a beach house, or hire caretakers for my father who was sick at the time, or hire a personal chef, or pay off my car, or … you get the point. In fact, if it’s all the same and a number is just a number, I wouldn’t wait for the money to appear. It was already there. I soon ran out of things to buy and donate to. I was satisfied. I went to a cute town up the road and had a day exploring and doing a little shopping. I explored the shops in the town I live in. I pretended I bought all the things I loved. I filled myself with good feelings and thoughts and worked hard to notice when I was living in a negative thought. I worked to think thoughts that made me feel better and I worked while sitting in meditation to get myself into Esther and Jerry Hick’s Vortex — the place where everything is possible. These books and listening to their YouTube channel have definitely shaped the way I see possibility, hope, joy, and my general overall mood and demeanor. These things really matter.
Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. Let’s begin with a definition of terms so that each of us and our readers are on the same page. What exactly does intuition mean? Can you explain?
Intuition is the gut sense of a situation. For me, it’s not just in my gut — it’s a hearing. It’s a seeing of ideas and being able to tap into the energy field and read the experiences of others. It’s stepping out of your brain logic. Brain logic is good and needed and necessary, but intuition doesn’t all happen in the brain. In fact, when my brain is involved, I often “hear” wrong — I misinterpret what I’m picking up or sensing. It’s allowing your imagination to open and see other interpretations, and then trusting what you are intuiting.
How would you define common sense? Are intuition and common sense related?
Common sense is seeing a situation and knowing the moral and physical decision to make. It’s being at a four-way stop sign, knowing the rules of the road, and being able to read what other cars are going to do to avoid an accident and to navigate the intersection intelligently. It’s knowing when to keep your mouth closed and swallow your pride, and knowing when you are willing to “die on a hill.”
Intuition and common sense are related in that sometimes your intuition will keep you safe. It will guide you to see an unwise decision a driver is about to make and therefore avoid an accident. Or it can help you to keep your mouth closed in a situation when you really want to give someone lip.
How are they different from each other?
Intuition will sometimes lead you into a situation that feels opposite of what your common sense would tell you to do. There were times when my intuition led me to do illogical things. I left a good, well-paying job that would help me get my student loans forgiven to go do something else altogether: I took a contract to be a public school therapist that did not get renewed at the end of the school year. Because I took the new job, I changed the energy of my life. I shifted the momentum and it has changed everything.
Here’s the thing that’s really important: sometimes intuition goes against reason. You can look at your circumstances and think, “This is never going to work out,” because all of the circumstances look exactly the opposite of what your intuition is telling you. This is where trust, releasing, and allowing come in. This is where breathing into resistance matters. This is where you might hit cognitive disconnect and doubt yourself and your intuition. Sometimes turning off your brain and trusting your gut leads to the best rides.
What are the positive aspects of being in touch with your intuition? Can you give a story or example to explain what you mean?
The positive aspects of intuition are that there is leadership and guidance available to you when you don’t know how to go. Before GPSs on our phones, I was driving around back country roads, not knowing how to get home. After a series of wrong turns and thereby getting myself thoroughly lost, I would change my mode of decision-making from my brain’s logical thinking to intuition. It was a shift in thinking and I would reach outside myself for the answer. Most of the time, listening to the thoughts that said, “Straight,” “Left,” and “Right,” would get me back to roads I would know enough to get myself back home. To be honest, I still kind of suck at hearing the best line to get into in the grocery store. But I’m really good at being able to write a note to someone and, using intuition, write what is true and sincere, knowing it is just the thing the person receiving the note needs to hear. At the end of the semester in every one of my Creative Writing classes, I would write such notes to my students. One day, I dropped a note to a student “just because” in another class and a student who had been in a Creative Writing class with me said, “A Beam note! That right there is gold!” My own mother once asked me how I always have the right words when someone shares bad news. The answer is I look outside of my logical brain for the response that is true, correct, uplifting, and right for this person in this moment.
Are there negative aspects to being guided by intuition? Can you give a story or example to explain what you mean?
In a very real, personal, and rather embarrassing story — here goes: I was just out of college. I was teaching on the North Shore of Boston. I was living in an apartment that later burned down, but that’s a story for another day. I believed I would marry the guy I was with at the time. We had dated for a number of months. He was struggling with his direction and what he wanted in life. He ended us. For a number of reasons that made sense at the time, I knew he was going to end us, and I knew we were going to get back together, only I didn’t have peace around the fact that we were going to get married one day. I was fretful about the whole thing. I was just learning about intuition and I would hear things — go here, go there, bumping into him every time. I was being led to see him, so I was going to marry him, right? I was wrong about the outcome; I was right in the daily listening to my gut and my core. For years, I would look back on this time with embarrassment. How could I have believed I was going to marry that guy? I didn’t even like him. I didn’t want kids because they would be like him. There were two things going on here, and instead of seeing the good that came out of this time in my life, for years, I only focused on the shame I experienced for believing something so ridiculous. But I learned to listen to my intuition through the process of a false belief. Once I realized marrying him was a very bad idea, I shut down my intuition for a while — read 5 years. I decided it was better to not listen to my gut than to listen to it and have it steer me in the wrong direction. There were so many lessons to learn in that moment that I was too ashamed to unpack. I did unpack the lessons eventually, but it wasn’t until I was almost 40 that I stopped feeling shame around this experience.
Can you give some guidance about when one should make a decision based on their intuition and when one should use other methods to come to a decision?
I honestly believe we are all doing the best we can with the information we have at hand. Would we go back and change things we did in the past with the information we have now? Yes. I’m sure for many of us there are situations we would go and undo or never do in the first place. I say all the time that you have two eyes out the front of your head and you see what’s in front of you. You can’t see what’s behind you or in your peripherals. You need someone else for that. This is also true for intuition, too. You might get hit after hit correctly for other people, but when it comes to yourself, you are “off.” You are too close to you. You are too close to your wants and your desires. Your perspective, and ability to hear and perceive are clouded by your emotions, your doubts, your fears, your … breakfast. Goodness knows what. You need a “great cloud of witnesses,” as it says in the Bible. You need your team, your spiritual support squad who also press into intuition and can affirm they are sensing the same things you are. Or who will read your situation for you as you read their situation for them. Because when you are looking at just yourself, it can be really hard to see and hear your intuition clearly. It’s much easier to hear for someone else.
From your experience or perspective, what are some of the common barriers that hold someone back from trusting their intuition?
Only one word is needed here: doubt. The nudgings, leanings, whispers, and synchronicities of intuition can be subtle and you have to really focus on them to hear and see them — you could just miss them altogether. It’s also easy to think you’re being guided by your intuition when you’re really not. When any of these things happen, your logical brain builds a case for why trusting your intuition is dumb and that your gut isn’t to be trusted.
Here is the central question of our discussion. What are five methods that someone can use to become more in touch with their intuition?
1 . Ask your Source. I don’t know what you believe in and this works in any faith practice. If you want to hear more about how to tap into intuition, ask your Guide(s). Ask for a sign. It happens all the time in the Bible, and God delivered. Whether you are Jewish with just the Torah and Havtorah or Christian with the Bible, the JeudoChristian God really liked to meet people with signs. If you are more of a Guide person, ask a member of your team to show you an animal, a sign in nature, or a gift from above (flowers delivered for no reason, a treat you are looking for). One summer, I asked for free ice cream. It came about six months later and I didn’t recognize it as a gift until later, but it totally happened.
2 . Meditate. The more you know how your brain thinks and experiences the world, the more you will be able to notice when you are being guided with deeper thoughts and ideas. If you know your mind and your thoughts, you will be able to discern what is yours and what comes from a higher bit of intelligence outside yourself.
3 . Step out into it — even if you are uncertain. When you get a sense to do something, instead of arguing with it (which is something I used to do) or shrugging it off (also sometime else I used to do), explore it. Press into it and see what adventures it leads you on. And let me be completely candid here, I will still blow it off from time to time.
4 . Know how your intuition speaks to you. Everyone gets “hits” with their intuition in different ways. I have practiced a number of them — automatic writing (which you can find examples of how to do in The Artist’s Way and The Automatic Writing Experiment) or guided meditation to meet my guides — a group of entities I actually now call my board of directors (Vishan Lakhiani has a MindVallley talk about this on youtube, but I originally got the idea from the book Manifesting through Meditation: 100 Guided Practices to Harness the Power of Your Thoughts and Create the Life You Want by Cassandra Bodzak). Sometimes it’s something you hear as a thought inside your head. You can muscle test, which is using the Superconscious to move your body to give you answers — eventually, the more you do it, the more you will just hear the response as a thought. Sometimes you are just doing something and you have no idea why you are doing it. Your logical brain may try to stop you, but you do it anyway — knowing in ways you don’t understand why you’re doing it, but you know it’s the right thing to do. The bummer is that it doesn’t matter which processes you gravitate toward over other processes, you are going to get it wrong. That’s fine. Keep a journal. Notice when you have it right and how you know you were right. Write down when you were wrong — what were the details around it, the things you learned, and how you can apply that learning to the future.
5 . Surround yourself with like-minded people who can help you on this journey. Whether that be you find a coach who can help you with this, you go to a retreat center like Omega or Art of Living RetreatCenter, you attend seminars with people like Paul Selig or Lee Harris, you read Gabrielle Bernstein’s or Dr. Joe Dispenza’s books, or you watch Esther Hicks’ YouTube videos over and over and over. All of these things are going to feed your ability to hear the voice of your intuition. If you ask the Universe, Source, or God — whoever is your higher power — for more people in your life who think about these things or can help you grow in this area, they will appear. Look for the connections and look for people who are pressing in to create more positivity in their lives.
You are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
Is it possible to bring a movement of meditation and self-awareness to a global community? Joe Dispenza states that he has meditators meditating all over the globe at the same time doing the same uplifting meditations he teaches and it can change the mood and atmosphere all over the globe. That sounds amazing. A more enlightened population? A more compassionate, kind, understanding, and empathetic global community? People who are out to support others, out to encourage others, out to bring love and acceptance to others. We need more of this. If there was a way to be a part of making this happen, it would be both humbling and awe-inspiring.
Is there a person in the world whom you would love to have lunch with, and why? Maybe we can tag them and see what happens!
I had two people pop into my head. The first was the girly-girl part of me and that’s Benedict Cumberbatch. Besides the crush I’ve had on him since his Sherlock days, he took a gap year before college to spend time with monks in Napal. He went and visited the ashram he lived at during his gap year while he was filming the first Dr. Strange movie. I would love to talk to him about meditation and what he learned there. I would also love to ask about how meditation applies to his life now.
But the first person who popped into my head was Michele Obama. She never ceases to impress me. She worked hard while she was First Lady to keep her daughters protected from the paparazzi. She made school lunch concerns, nutrition, and childhood poverty a known issue in the United States. She talked about childhood hunger and brought it into society’s consciousness. She talked about health and the need for psychical health, sleep hygiene, and balanced meals on school lunches (and not counting tater tots as a vegetable). She also took heat and criticism for weird things — wearing sleeveless shirts, having muscled arms, and being in shape and fit. Women are judged first for their clothes and their appearance and Michele Obama was no exception. She was ripped apart for being healthy and for being proud of that (an assumption made by her wearing sleeveless shirts). But, no one could fault her for her class,
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Website in the works… www.socialworkyourlife.com coming soon!
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
About The Interviewer: Maria Angelova, MBA is a disruptor, author, motivational speaker, body-mind expert, Pilates teacher and founder and CEO of Rebellious Intl. As a disruptor, Maria is on a mission to change the face of the wellness industry by shifting the self-care mindset for consumers and providers alike. As a mind-body coach, Maria’s superpower is alignment which helps clients create a strong body and a calm mind so they can live a life of freedom, happiness and fulfillment. Prior to founding Rebellious Intl, Maria was a Finance Director and a professional with 17+ years of progressive corporate experience in the Telecommunications, Finance, and Insurance industries. Born in Bulgaria, Maria moved to the United States in 1992. She graduated summa cum laude from both Georgia State University (MBA, Finance) and the University of Georgia (BBA, Finance). Maria’s favorite job is being a mom. Maria enjoys learning, coaching, creating authentic connections, working out, Latin dancing, traveling, and spending time with her tribe. To contact Maria, email her at angelova@rebellious-intl.com. To schedule a free consultation, click here.
Keeping In Touch With Your Intuition: Kim Beam Of Social Work Your Life On How Get In Touch With… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.